gut healing Archives - Amazing Health Advances

What You Eat May Change the Way That Antibiotics Affect Your Gut

AHA Publisher — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 02:55:45 +0000

Sally Robertson, B.Sc. via News Medical – Net – “Doctors now know that each antibiotic prescription has the potential to lead to some very harmful microbiome-related health outcomes, but they do not have reliable tools to protect this critical community while also treating deadly infections.” A new study by researchers at Brown University in Rhode Island has found that diet can influence how the gut microbiome is affected by treatment with antibiotics. The scientists examined how antibiotics change the gut bacteria in mice and then looked at how diet may exacerbate or mitigate these changes. “For a long time, we’ve known that antibiotics impact the microbiome,” says study author Peter Belenky. “We have also known that diet impacts the microbiome. This is the first paper that brings those two facts together.” Belenky says the goal of his laboratory’s work is to identify new ways to protect the microbiome, which may alleviate some of the worst antibiotic side effects. The Gut Microbiome The gut microbiome is made up of trillions of bacteria that benefit the host. They aid the breakdown of dietary fiber and maintain overall intestinal health by competing with harmful bacteria for resources that would be essential for their survival such as nutrients and space. Although antibiotics save the lives of countless people who are infected with harmful bacteria, these drugs can also disrupt this community of beneficial bacteria that live in the human intestine. This, in turn, can lead to other life-threatening infections. Belenky, who is a Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Brown’s, has been studying the effect fo antibiotics on the gut and looking for ways to counteract imbalances in the microbiome that can lead to potentially life-threatening infections such as C. difficile. “Although antibiotics disturb the structure of the gut microbiota, factors that modulate these perturbations are poorly understood,” writes the team. Reducing the Detrimental Effects of Antibiotics Through Diet As recently reported in the journal Cell Metabolism, Belenky and colleagues have now demonstrated that although the antibiotics they used did perturb the composition and metabolic capacity of the murine gut microbiome, this disruption could also be exacerbated or minimized by making changes to the animals’ diet. Belenky and colleagues already knew that bacterial metabolism is an important regulator of antibiotic susceptibility in vitro and probably plays a significant role within the host. They applied a metagenomic and metatranscriptomic approach to investigate associations between antibiotic-induced taxonomic and transcriptional responses within the mouse microbiome. For the study, lead author Damien Cabral and colleagues treated three groups of mice with different antibiotics, namely amoxicillin, ciprofloxacin or doxycycline. They then charted how the composition of the animals’ gut microbiomes changed and how bacteria adapted at the metabolic level following treatment. Amoxicillin, an antibiotic commonly used to treat strep throat and ear infections, significantly reduced levels of bacteria in the gut and also changed the genes that the remaining bacteria use. Ciprofloxacin (often used to treat urinary tract infections) and doxycycline (commonly used to treat sinus infections), also altered the gut microbiome, although those changes were less pronounced. The team found that the antibiotics significantly altered the expression of key metabolic pathways at the whole-community and single-species levels. Notably, one type of beneficial bacteria, Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron, flourished in response to amoxicillin treatment. This bacterium upregulated polysaccharide utilization to aid the digestion of fiber, a change that seems to enable it to bloom in the altered ecosystem and somehow protect against the antibiotic, says Belenky. Generally, the bacteria downregulated the use of genes involved in normal growth processes such as producing new proteins and DNA. They also upregulated their use of genes that are essential in stress resistance The Effects of Glucose (Sugar) Were Clear Interestingly, the researchers found that adding glucose to the animals’ diet — which is usually low in simple sugars and high in fiber — increased susceptibility of B. thetaiotaomicron to amoxicillin. “In vitro, we found that the sensitivity of this bacterium to amoxicillin was elevated by glucose and reduced by polysaccharides,” writes the team. This suggests that diet can provide some beneficial effects that may protect gut bacteria from the adverse effects of antibiotic use. According to Belenky, the findings represent a step toward helping humans to better tolerate antibiotic treatment: Revealing New Opportunities However, “now that we know diet is important for bacterial susceptibility to antibiotics, we can ask new questions about which nutrients are having an impact and see if we can predict the influence of different diets,” he says. Belenky warned that the study only looked at rodents and much remains to be learned about the interplay between host diet, microbiome metabolism and susceptibility to antibiotics. Belenky and team are currently investigating how different types of dietary fibers may impact how the microbiome changes following antibiotic treatment, as well as how diabetes may affect the microbiome’s metabolic environment and vulnerability to antibiotics. To read the original article click here.

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The Answer to a Colon Cancer Mystery

The AHA! Team — Sun, 18 Aug 2019 07:00:00 +0000

Michael Greger M.D. FACLM via Nutrition Facts – “[T]he method of cooking and eating the maize [corn] meal as a porridge results in an increase in resistant starch, which acts in the same way as fiber in the colon,” as a prebiotic, a food for our good bacteria to produce the same cancer-preventing, short-chain fatty acids. Colorectal cancer is the third most common cause of cancer death in the world. Thankfully, the good bacteria in our gut take the fiber we eat and make short-chain fatty acids, like butyrate, that protect us from cancer. We take care of them, and they take care of us. If we do nothing to colon cancer cells, they grow. That’s what cancer does. But if we expose the colon cancer cells to the concentration of butyrate our good bacteria make in our gut when we eat fiber, the growth is stopped in its tracks. If, however, the butyrate stops, if we eat healthy for only one day and then turn off the fiber the next, the cancer can resume its growth. So, ideally, we have to eat a lot of fiber-rich foods – meaning whole plant foods – every day. What about the populations, like those in modern sub-Saharan Africa, where they don’t eat a lot of fiber yet still rarely get colon cancer? Traditionally, they used to eat a lot of fiber, but now their diet is centered around highly refined corn meal, which is low in fiber – yet they still have low colon cancer rates. Why? This was explained by the fact that while they may be lacking protective factors like fiber, they are also lacking cancer-promoting factors like animal protein and fat. But are they really lacking protective factors? If you measure the pH of their stools, the black populations in South Africa have lower pH, which means more acidic stools, despite comparable fiber intakes. That’s a good thing and may account for the lower cancer rates. But, wait a second. Low colon pH is caused by short-chain fatty acids, which are produced by our good bacteria when they eat fiber, but they weren’t eating any more fiber, suggesting there was something else in addition to fiber in their diets that was feeding their flora. And, indeed, despite low fiber intake, the bacteria in their colon were still churning out short-chain fatty acids like crazy. But if their bacteria weren’t eating fiber, what were they eating? Resistant starch. “[T]he method of cooking and eating the maize [corn] meal as a porridge results in an increase in resistant starch, which acts in the same way as fiber in the colon,” as a prebiotic, a food for our good bacteria to produce the same cancer-preventing, short-chain fatty acids. As I discuss in my video Resistant Starch and Colon Cancer, “[r]esistant starch is any starch that is not digested and absorbed in the upper digestive tract [our small intestine] and, so, passes into the large bowel,” our colon, to feed our good bacteria. When you boil starches and then let them cool, some of the starch can recrystallize into a form resistant to our digestive enzymes. So, we can get resistant starch eating cooled starches, such as pasta salad, potato salad, or cold cornmeal porridge. “This may explain the striking differences in colon cancer rates.” Thus, they were feeding their good bacteria after all, but just with lots of starch rather than fiber. “Consequently, a high carbohydrate diet may act in the same way as a high fiber diet.” Because a small fraction of the carbs make it down to our colon, the more carbs we eat, the more butyrate our gut bacteria can produce. Indeed, countries where people eat the most starch have some of the lowest colon cancer rates, so fiber may not be the only protective factor. Only about 5 percent of starch may reach the colon, compared to 100 percent of the fiber, but we eat up to ten times more starch than fiber, so it can potentially play a significant role feeding our flora. So, the protection Africans enjoy from cancer may be two-fold: a diet high in resistant starch and low in animal products. Just eating more resistant starch isn’t enough. Meat contains or contributes to the production of presumed carcinogens, such as N-nitroso compounds. A study divided people into three groups: one was on a low-meat diet, the second was on a high-meat diet including beef, pork, and poultry, and the third group was on the same high-meat diet but with the addition of lots of resistant starch. The high-meat groups had three times more of these presumptive carcinogens and twice the ammonia in their stool than the low-meat group, and the addition of the resistant starch didn’t seem to help. This confirms that “exposure to these compounds is increased with meat intake,” and 90 percent are created in our bowel. So, it doesn’t matter if we get nitrite-free, uncured fresh meat; these nitrosamines are created from the meat as it sits in our colon. This “may help explain the higher incidence of large bowel cancer in meat-eating populations,” along with the increase in ammoniaâ€”neither of which could be helped by just adding resistant starch on top of the meat. “[T]he deleterious effects of animal products on colonic metabolism override the potentially beneficial effects of other protective nutrients.” So, we should do a combination of less meat and more whole plant foods, along with exercise, not only for our colon, but also for general health. This article has been modified. To read the original article click here. For more articles by Dr. Greger click here.

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